Pencil sketch of two unicorn heads with monarch-style butterflies, drawn as a tattoo design on plain paper with no body part shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two unicorns with butterflies pencil design

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of two unicorn heads, one partly behind the other, with their horns and manes flowing across the page. Three butterflies with detailed wing patterns are placed around the heads, one above and two on the left and lower edges. The linework is fine and the forms are lightly shaded in graphite on off-white paper, with no colour.

Unicorn Horse Butterfly Mane Horn

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Harrow Court had been out since Tuesday, so Mr Achebe and I took the stairs with our shopping, nineteen floors, stopping on every landing to let the breathlessness pass. He carried his sketchbook under one arm like a loaf.

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On the fourteenth landing someone's football had gone through the window, and a red admiral had come in and was walking along the sill as if it paid rent. Mr Achebe stopped, opened his book to a page of horses drawn in pencil, and said the trick with horses was to let the mane do the arguing. He had been drawing unicorns for his granddaughter, who was seven and had decided they were the only animals worth knowing about.

He showed me the two heads he was working on, one nosing close behind the other, a butterfly settled on the near ear and two more coming in low from the bottom of the page. "They're not fighting," he said. "Look, the far one is only making sure the near one doesn't wander off the edge." I told him that was the most Mr Achebe thing I had ever heard, and he laughed so hard he had to sit on the stairs.

When we reached the top he gave me the page, and I pinned it inside our flat door with a drawing pin from the kitchen drawer. The council painted the stairwell grey the following month, and the window on fourteen was boarded up, but the unicorns stayed on my door, and the granddaughter came round every Saturday to check that the far one was still keeping watch.